Geodemography

The origins of geodemographics

The origins of geodemographics are often identified as Charles Booth and his studies of deprivation and poverty in early twentieth century London, and the Chicago School of sociology. Booth developed the idea of 'classifying neighborhoods', exemplified by his multivariate classification of the 1891 UK Census data to create a generalized social index of London’s (then) registration districts. Research at the Chicago School - though generally qualitative in nature - strengthened the idea that such classifications could be meaningful by developing the idea of ‘natural areas’ within cities: conceived as geographical units with populations of broadly homogenous social-economic and cultural characteristics.

The idea that census outputs could serve to identify and to characterize the geographies of cities gathered momentum with the increased availability of national census data and the computational ability to look for patterns in such data. Of particular importance to the emerging geodemographic industry was the development of clustering techniques to group statistically similar neighborhoods into classes on a 'like with like' basis. More recently, data have become available at finer geographical resolutions (such as postal units), often originating from private commercial (i.e. non-governmental) sources.

Commercial geodemographics emerged from the late 1970s with the launch of PRIZM by Claritas in the US and ACORN by CACI in the UK. Geodemography has been used to target consumer services to 'ideal' populations based on their lifestyle and location. These parameters have been taken from geographical databases as well as from electoral lists and credit agencies.

Combining these builds a picture of the population characteristics in different locations. The geodemographic data that this provides can then be used by marketeers to target information towards those that they want to influence. This can be in the form of sales, services or even political information.

In 2005 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in collaboration with Dan Vickers and Phil Ress of the University of Leeds, released the first free small scale social area classification of the UK.

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